


stepped off the golden

by homeward_bound (babylxxrry)



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Introspection, Mind the Tags, Stream of Consciousness, see notes for more info
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:07:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babylxxrry/pseuds/homeward_bound
Summary: corpse dreams, and copes.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35





	stepped off the golden

**Author's Note:**

> mind the tags, please, as well as the following.
> 
> content warning: corpse has a dream/nightmare of dying by suicide (fic is basically stream of consciousness style during this). he does not die in real life. open but hopeful ending.
> 
> loosely inspired by corpse saying that he sometimes sits in his friends' game calls to feel less lonely. i don't have a link, but it was during the phasmophobia stream with the amigops (12/16/20).
> 
> fic heavily driven by billie eilish's "everything i wanted". see those lyrics for a rough outline of the vibes of this fic, and please use your own discretion as to if you can or want to handle it.

He sleeps in fits and starts, when he sleeps.

He counts the hours he’s unconscious, and the hours he wishes he were unconscious, and the hours he stares at his screens until his eyes burn because everything else hurts more.

He sleeps in the early morning, from 4:00am or 5:00am, usually, for three or four hours on a normal night, every couple of days. 

He tries to line up his sleep schedule with those of his friends, so he can be around when they ask if he wants to play this or that. 

He can’t always control it, though, because once you’ve gone four days on an hour and a half of sleep, it’s hard to control when and how long you go down. 

The last thing he remembers thinking today at 4:00pm is that if he’s lucky, he’ll get five hours. 

\--

He dreams.

It’s not uncommon. 

He sees faces and motions and mirrors and bridges and blood and mirrors and glass and mirrors and mirrors and mirrors and-

He stands on the wrong side of a guardrail, looking out over the river below. It’s not far enough to guarantee anything. But the water crashes over the rocks and he doesn’t have to see his own face reflected back at him, the scratches on his cheek healing from the last time he caught his reflection in his phone screen and reacted before he could stop himself. 

He thinks he sees people walking up on the bridge. He turns his head to look at them. 

It’s Rae, and it’s Dave, and it’s Toast, and it’s Jack. It’s Sykkuno.

It’s people he’s come to care about, deeply, in the last few weeks? months? years?

Time slips out of his hands and the sweat that erupts on his palms makes them slippery on the cold metal. Would they notice, if he let go? Would they even care?

He wants to call out to them, wants to ask them to stop him, wants them to tell him to come back to them, to climb back over the rail, that they care about him and that they want him around. He wants to, so desperately, but he also wants to know if they would stop him. He wants to know if they care about him enough to stop him of their own accord, and not because he begged them to. 

He flexes his hands on the guardrail. 

The river is so dark, and so tempting. The rocks jutting out of it smile threateningly at him. How long has it been since he’s slept? Two days? Three? Four? The rocks shouldn’t be smiling, but they are. He can see their teeth, shining white even in the middle of the night. 

His friends can see him by now, surely. One of them will stop him, right? 

Right?

They stop and look at him, and Rae nudges Sykkuno and points and- one of them has to stop him, right? They see him, standing here, on the wrong side of a guardrail, right?

RIght?

What would happen, if he let go?

Would Rae scream? 

Would Sykkuno cry out his name?

Would Dave and Toast and Jack run towards him?

Would they do anything at all?

His chest tightens and he turns his eyes back to the long, long drop. It’s comforting, for some reason. Maybe because it’s predictable. He knows the consequences if he lets go. He knows what the river will do. He will be engulfed and battered against the rocks and his body will be washed up downstream, or maybe he will be swept out to sea. He always loved the ocean, as little as he ever got to see it. 

He doesn’t look at his friends, because he can’t predict what they will do. It’s unnerving, being stuck in a space where he has to wonder about the consequences of his actions. It’s hard, having people that say they care about him. It’s hard, trying to appease them and the audiences all knowing that he will never, ever deserve any of their time or attention. It’s fucking hard. And he is so tired. 

He wonders, sometimes, if they would even notice. 

The audiences would, of course. Of course they would. But how many of them would remember him in a year? Two? Three? 

Would his friends notice? Would they care?

His hands are shaking, he thinks, and his knuckles are sore from how hard he’s holding on to the rail. It’s a sign, some part of him thinks, that he doesn’t want to go. But everything else in him screams at him to let go. It would hurt, probably, when he landed, but pain is familiar. Pain is okay. He knows pain, in all of its manifestations. Pain, he thinks, might be easier than uncertainty. He doesn’t know if he can stand waiting to see if they stop him. 

He looks over once again, and meets Sykkuno’s eyes by accident. Sykkuno doesn’t look panicked, or scared, or even worried at all. Sykkuno stares back at him, eyes level and shuttered and-

He panics.

He lets go and flings himself forward and falls and-

Somehow he’s looking up at the bridge. He can see them all standing, leaning on the guardrail, growing smaller and smaller with every millisecond that passes. There are no screams. There are no hands reached out towards him. 

He doesn’t know how long he falls. One second? Two? Three?

He lands on his back in the river, his head snapping backwards against a crag of rock, and the word goes black. 

\--

He hears screaming, and jolts upright. 

He is sitting on a bare mattress, all of his bedding kicked onto the floor. He is drenched in sweat, and his throat hurts the way it usually only does after a particularly bad night. 

He was screaming, he realizes. He doesn’t know how long, or how loud, or if anyone in the building or on the street heard him. It’s not uncommon, though, in this area, and he’s put up soundproofing on his walls, so it’s not like anyone would care even if they heard. 

Would his friends care, if they heard him screaming? 

A residual pulse of panic makes his stomach clench.

He finds his phone on the floor. 

5:45pm. An hour and forty five minutes. 

He’d hoped for more, but he isn’t surprised. 

No one has messaged in the time he’s been asleep. He’s not surprised. Most of the people who talk to him on a semi-regular basis are streaming right now. He wants to turn someone’s stream on, just to hear a voice, just to calm his mind down, but his whole body aches. He could just open Twitch on his phone, but it feels like cheating somehow. He doesn’t know why. It’s stupid. It’s irrational. But isn’t everything about him?

He texts Rae, on the off chance that she’s not directly in the middle of a game, because she won’t ask questions the way Sykkuno or anyone else would. She understands when he needs to just be around people and under no pressure to interact. 

She’s playing Minecraft, her Discord tag says.

>> _ hey, sorry to bother. would it be alright if i sat in the call to listen?  _

She replies almost instantly.

<< _ Of course. I’ll tell the others not to say anything if they’re streaming. We’re just fucking around on the Minecraft server right now. _

>> _ thank you, rae. _

She reacts to his message with a little Bingus emoji and the sight of it makes him feel just a little less shitty. 

He clicks into the voice channel and is greeted by a few voices he hopes to god are not streaming. He doesn’t respond, and no one pushes him to. 

It eases the tension in his chest to just lie on his bare mattress with his phone up by his head, listening to people chatter about crafting this and that, punctuated with the occasional friendly-heated debate and the occasional surprised scream when someone dies to a surprise Creeper. 

He doesn’t know how long he stays there. An hour? Two? Three?

The uncertainty is still there. It might always be, he thinks, because people and friendships are always changing, but it’s a little easier to let himself believe things are okay as he hears people start to end their streams and bid their chats goodbye. 

A few texts come in, a bit later, asking if he’d like to join them for Among Us tomorrow, if he’d like to hang out on a voice call for a bit sometime, if he’s alright. 

It’s nice, kind of, to know that people care, at least somewhat. He doesn’t know how far it extends, if at all, but it’s okay. He can pretend, for a while. 

It will all come crashing down someday, he knows this to be true, because there has never been anything he’s touched that hasn’t, but he allows himself to be selfish for now. It will be okay.

//

**Author's Note:**

> comments are currently open to registered users and moderated, but i will not hesitate to close them should i decide to.
> 
> usa suicide hotline: 800-273-8255


End file.
